Nursing students' attitudes, knowledge, and willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine: A cross-sectional study

AimTo investigate nursing students konwledge, attitudes and willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, and the influencing factors. BackgroundVaccination is one of the effective measures to prevent COVID-19, but the vaccination acceptance varies across countries and populations. As reserve nurses, nursing students have both the professionalism of medical personnel and the special characteristics of school students, their attitudes, knowledge, and willingness to receive the COVID-19 vaccine may greatly affect the vaccine acceptance of the population now and in the future. But little research has been done on vaccine acceptance among nursing students. DesignA cross-sectional survey of nursing students was conducted via online questionnaires in March 2021. MethodsDescriptive statistics, independent sample t tests/one-way ANOVA (normal distribution), Mann-Whitney U tests/Kruskal-Wallis H tests (skewness distribution) and multivariate linear regression were performed. ResultsThe score rate of attitude, knowledge and vaccination willingness were 70.07%, 80.70% and 84.38% respectively. Attitude was significantly influenced by family economic conditions and whether a family member had been vaccinated. The main factors influencing knowledge were gender, grade and academic background. In terms of willingness, gender, academic background, visits to risk areas, whether family members were vaccinated, and whether they had side effects were significant influencing factors. ConclusionsThe vaccine acceptance of nursing students was fair. Greater focus needed to be placed on the males, those of younger age, with a science background, and having low grades, as well as on students whose family members had not received the COVID-19 vaccine or had side effects from the vaccine. Targeted intervention strategies were recommended to improve vaccination rates.